Just a Little Jog — 36

In this post, we conclude with the kids' birthdays and with clowns, proceeding then to other birthdays, anniversaries and one memorable confession at — get this! — St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

We had started making mental lists after perhaps a year of sussing out the Westchester —specifically for us, the Chappaqua—sphere: the Chappaquan sensibility, the Big C Genome. We were trying to figure Things Acceptable versus Things Not Acceptable as well as Things You Really Have to Do. Since moving to town we had readily and willingly succumbed to certain of the rituals of the region: not just tallying points at the A&P toward a free turkey (“or should we get the ham, Honey?”), or trying all sorts of purportedly-enviro hoodoo to deal with deer in the garden and squirrels at the bird-feeder, or learning how to install bannisters and put together a Weber (worst twenty-five-dollar assembly fee I ever saved), or always scooping Daisy’s poop during our jogs (not all our neighbors were so considerate vis-à-vis their canine companions; we have followed suit with Lulu’s leavings), but, also, lining up a lawn service, getting the minivan washed regularly, going to parties when invited and making sure everyone even vaguely pertinent was invited to our own. Among things we analyzed that Luci and I promised to forever and forever forswear were: never talking on a cell phone while driving (and we made this vow before the law was passed) and, now, never renting a queen or even a princess. Or, especially, a clown.

How’s does the old adage go? The one about compromising by degrees? The one you learned from Starzinger’s “Situational Ethics” lecture in Govie Ten during fall term, sophomore year. The one about giving in only a bit, then another bit, and then the bits add up. The one about how time and circumstance change you little by little and you don't even see what's happening, and then you turn around and, boom, it’s happened. It's not the Heisenberg Principle. It sounds scholarly like “Heisenberg,” but it's something else. Starzinger died a few years ago; I can’t call him. Let’s think of it, for now, as the Slippery Slope Theorem. It’s not that, but that’ll do.

We had been sucked into the nursery school madness for a brief bit there, then there was the pony party, and now, as we were becoming adepts with the local habit of breaking vows, we espied Paul, whistling his way down the Ephesian Road. (Actually, that’s a truly stupid and wrongheaded allusion, even if it amused me in thinking it up. Not, obviously, that Paul. But, rather: Paul the Magic Clown.)

Our Pauline mission (there you go again!) started, actually, with Juggles.

I was watching a Pats game on the tube when I first heard the name Juggles. My concentration was less than a hundred percent, what with the game on. Today, I can’t for the life of me place where it was that Caroline and the twins had become entranced by this Juggles. I do recall that Luci was filling me in about it, whatever circumstance and whatever place it had been—a party? a parade in town? My mind was half there, at best. “Is he a juggler?” I asked reasonably as Brady threw an interception. “Ah . . . sugar!” (The kids were within earshot.)

“Well, he does juggle. But he does other things, too. He's a clown. I got his card.”

“Clowns have cards in Chappaqua?”

“Of course,” Luci said evenly. “I thought maybe we could have Juggles for Caroline's party.”

The Broncos had moved into the red zone, so I didn't have the presence of mind to mention that NO CLOWNS was chiseled upon our tablet of commandments. The next thing I knew, Luci was hanging up the phone and saying, “Juggles is busy that day.”

“Mmmmm.”

“He recommended Paul the Magic Clown.”

“Mmmmm.”

Paul was available; Paul was signed; the Patriots lost to Denver. (Needs explaining: This was way, way back when the Early Brady/Belichick Era Pats occasionally lost.)

The following Saturday, we bumped into Paul. He was working the crowd at Chappaqua's Raggamuffin Hallowe'en Parade. Luci introduced herself and Caroline to Paul, and Paul was pleased to meet this latest little girl at whose birthday party he was to perform his star turn. Caroline looked wary. He’s not Juggles. “I'm Juggles's brother,” Paul said, and I thought that was a nifty and nimble seat-of-his-multicolored-pants gambit.

Jack, in a bee suit, looked up from the Radio Flyer wagon at Paul and did not comment. Mary Grace, who was a cat, appeared to be terrified. I didn't really have much of an opinion, except that Paul looked . . . Well, he looked like a clown. And, also: that this clown was soon to be in our house—and how about that, Daddy-o?

Paul showed up early the following Sunday in full regalia—costume, makeup, the harlequined works. When I greeted him at the door I was tempted by a little joke—“Oh, you must be Paul!”—but I resisted out of respect. (It has to be difficult to travel as a clown.) I showed Paul where he could put his table and reported that the half dozen or so little girls were in the other room, making tiaras. “One of the moms,” I said further, “told us that her daughter hates clowns—they frighten her. I told the mom I would set up an anti-clown room, so if one of the girls freaks, just give me the high sign and I will remove the miscreant urchin.” I intended to take any clown-averse partygoers to the study, put on the Rolling Stones and teach them stud poker.

“I think she’ll be okay,” Paul said confidently. I wasn't so sure.

Paul the Magic Clown is smarter than most of us. He was smarter than me, surely. Having organized his clownish accouterments, he walked slowly into the other room, casually picking up a goldfish cracker as he went. The girls had noticed his presence—how could they not have?—but, perhaps due to that elusive force that is peer pressure, a force as strong as diamonds in our town, none of them had exploded. Paul spoke not a word but went straight to his work. He crouched, put the cracker on his tongue, then proceeded to do six or eight things with it—in, out, here, there, behind the ears, down the throat, out the nose, gone. The girls giggled, and Paul did a couple of other tricks, then said, “I'll see you later.” To hash a couple of water-based metaphors, ice had been broken, and Paul would have smooth sailing from here on in. He was a pro.

And he was, to put it succinctly, magnificent. I never saw this Juggles, but if he was a patch on Paul’s patched pants, then he, too, was a helluva clown. In a perfectly paced hour, Paul juggled, told jokes, taught Daddy a trick with a disappearing quarter, made animal balloons, quizzed the girls, told stories, did lots of magic, publicly and purposefully humiliated Daddy with the “parent rocket” balloon, which could throw a fart like Edgar Bergan could throw his voice. Paul did it all, and wonderfully well; his was a tour de force performance by an amiable, gentle, charismatic clown who might wow any crowd while always exhibiting a modest manner. When one of the girls called him Juggles by mistake, Paul said, “That’s okay. I’ll be Juggles.” This man, confident and comfortable in his own skin and rags, had no ego.

Caroline, in the know and sanguine with that, chimed in: “Actually, he's Juggles’s brother.”

Well, whoever he was in the clown family, he was tops. As I bid him farewell at the door, I said, and I meant it: “Paul, we've got two-year-old twins. They were in the wagon at the parade. I don’t know what lies ahead, but wherever we go from here, you’re our clown.” Paul smiled broadly; no Emmett Kelly or Weary Willie sadsack stuff for him. I think he was genuinely touched (though it's hard to tell with clowns because they’ve got that makeup around their mouths and eyes).

The moral of the story is, of course: Except on your wedding day, make no vows. Yes, sure, the no-cellphone-while-driving resolution’s okay, and in fact in my opinion it should be extended even to hands-free talking on the newer phones and Bluetooth rigs. But, generally speaking, vows, especially presumptuous vows that are made because you think you know a thing or two, are facile, useless, even on occasion dumb—and always arrogant. They’ll fall by the wayside, one by one. You’ll find yourself altered, bit by bit. You’ll feel you’re being compromised, and maybe you’ll be disappointed in yourself, when you never should have set yourself up for such a letdown in the first place. Life’s one Slippery Slope after another, isn’t it?

I was anti-clown because I wasn’t going to get caught up in what I assumed to be some big, county-wide birthday party competition. I was anti-clown because I have long been and remain wary of becoming too Chappaquan.

In retrospect, I would say I took my eye off the ball. The clown question wasn’t about me. The clown was for the kids. It was a nice, unostentatious party with a mild, modest (if, I say, Ringling-quality) clown. And Luci and I are fortunate to have worked ourselves to a place where we can afford clowns, even help to prop up the clown economy in the region.

Spring, 2020: Upon analysis, I find myself lamenting that, with the kids grown, our clowning days are, pretty much, behind us.

∞

I fessed up about a hundred paragraphs ago about forgetting one birthday of Luci’s, for which she let me have it (and which she still brings up from time to time). But I have never missed our wedding anniversary.

La Tulipe has been useful there, too. Luci and I recently celebrated the landmark twenty-five years of, as the phrase is, matrimonial bliss, and I’m not sure how many Tulipe cakes that accounts for, but it’s more than a few. Quite soon enough, on March Fourth, it will be another anniversary, another cake.

How did Luci and I meet? It was not in Chelmsford, although Chelmsford plays a part. I was of Chelmsford from the day my mother and I were driven home from St. Joe’s Hospital in Lowell in November 1953 until the day I left for college seventeen-plus years later, in 1971. Luci, meantime, was of Pennsylvania and California before Chelmsford, arriving in Massachusetts with her mom and Marie, who is younger than her by two years, during the Rossi girls’ high school years. I was already in place on a New Hampshire college campus by then and spending summers working in the White Mountains, so I was only “home” for “visits.”

Which I was in December 1980, as was Luci, but we did not introduce ourselves at Jack’s Diner in Chelmsford Center or at Skip’s or Valley Ridge Farm or the Glenview Tavern or the Princeton Lounge. If it happened that we were in the same Chelmsford room—at Marshalls? at Mass?—we don’t know it. We did meet that holiday season, though: down Route 3 (and a bit of 128) in Lexington.

By then we were both of New York City, where we had landed independent of each other in 1979 (her) and ’80 (me). She was staying with her mom and sister for a few days in her old bedroom at Mrs. Rossi’s house in the center section of town, and I was on a couch downstairs at Mom and Dad’s on Berkeley Drive, center-west. A couple of days after Christmas, a high school friend of mine was co-hosting a brunch at a big ramshackle place (Lexington still had a few ramshackle places in the early eighties). She was sharing her destined-to-be-a-teardown rental with some other CHS alums who had, in the past few years, also graduated from college. They were working in Boston like so many semi-broke youngsters, launched upon their fated or ill-fated futures. So, theirs was a Lexington version of a postgrad frat/sorority house. A good, healthy scene.

One of my friend’s fiends had been a high school friend of Luci’s, and so Luci had driven down to this Lexington party, too; we might’ve passed one another on the highway. At the crowded, festive brunch, I had made a plate of food and was standing in the living room watching the Pats-Dolphins game. A smiling woman with dark hair who was wearing black leather pants (funny what you remember) came up with what appeared to be a Bloody Mary and said cheerily, “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said. Apparently, I noted the slacks.

This was during the flip-a-coin Pre-coming-into-Prime Brady/Belichick Epoch, and the Pats were required to beat the Dolphins that afternoon if our post-season was to be anything at all (funny what you remember). And so, while Luci couldn’t have been nicer, I certainly could have been much nicer, meaning polite and attentive to a stranger. I was distracted every which way.

Nevertheless, we managed a conversation and traded phone numbers in the (212) area code, agreeing to maybe share rides or a bench on Amtrak if any future trips home to Chelmsford happened to coincide. We in fact have shared nearly forty years, twenty-five of them as wife and husband. Funny how things work out.

To say we tarried in tying the knot is to say the obvious. Forty minus twenty-five leaves a full fifteen, after all, math being the immutable son-of-a-gun it is. Fifteen years in which we tied no knots tightly, made no vows solemnly. At our rehearsal dinner at the Colonial Inn in Concord a quarter century ago, many of our friends offered testimonials about how happy we always seemed—at celebrations, dinners, et cetera; at the shared beach house; on the dance floor at Heartbreak; over burgers at the Cedar or Chumley’s; after winning again at Trivial Pursuit parties—and, therefore, “Why in God’s name did it take you so long?” Ha, Ha: What a jovial toast! Ha, Ha f’in Ha.

We had and have no defense. We have nothing reasonable to share with Caroline and the twins as to why they’re not older, which of course they want to be. Let’s just say the 1980s in Manhattan didn’t seem, to Luci and me, the right time to settle down.

If our personal history proves anything, it’s that we might have been wise to wait, because the marriage has been a durable, never-questioned thing. That thought brings me to Rome.

I was lucky in my day-job throughout my years at Time Inc.: It supplied me enough bread to eat and sent me to places I never would have visited otherwise. On the company dime, I walked the street of the former Yugoslavia and the fervid markets of Morocco. I’ve been in the high Alps and the low-lying Everglades, Beijing and Bucharest. I’ve seen the Northern Lights and had two postings in the southern antipodes.

I’ve been to Rome once and I can date this with precision: It would have been in the year 2000, because that—the turning of the millennium—was the subject of my assignment. Pope John Paul II had declared a Jubilee year to celebrate Christianity’s great occasion, and I was to write about the doings in Rome on the anniversary. The story’s slug, as offered to me by Bruce, the editor who offered the assignment: VATICAN CITY—2000 YEARS OF JESUS.

This seemed an easy lift, and I approached the story with great pleasure. The execution of it exceeded my expectations. I was fortunate enough to privately tour St. Peter’s netherworld tombs and climb to the Basilica’s pinnacle. In the Vatican museums, the Raphaels astonished—but of course they did. Michelangelo, too, was an of course, and he was everywhere. I saw his Pieta for the second time in my life. The first instance was via a slow-moving “magic carpet” treadmill that transported me and a million others past its splendid Carrara-marbled magnificence at a safe distance during the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. This occurred during our family’s first-ever trip outside New England (and the sculpture’s first ever trip outside Europe). I didn’t enjoy that initial exposure to “great art” half as much as I did the debut of Disney’s Small World ride (and that song! Mary Grace still loves that song!) or the waffles with ice cream at the Belgian Pavilion, but, still, I knew enough, even at age ten, to add a check mark next to Michelangelo on my life list. Bagged Buonarroti. True enough at the time, but I will say the artist would by improved, for me, by my increased age—and so would his Pieta. I saw the thing back then, but I revered the thing thirty-six years later.

I and Luci and our families on both sides, plus now our kids, are Roman Catholic, which I’ve mentioned on the run. Even if we’re of varying degrees of devotion when it comes to practicing, our general Catholicism was at the front of mind during my time at the Vatican. I would not write the article from that perspective, but I couldn’t view the scene in any other way.

Now, here’s the curious bit you might not know: In the year 2000, any and all pilgrims to the Vatican were granted, by the power vested in John Paul II and whatever decrees he might then issue, “the indulgence,” which would absolve the visitor of all sins—all of them, no matter how heinous—just for coming to Rome and confessing. Hey, you murderers! Italy Indulgence Package Tour Specials—One Year Only. Act Now!

I had not killed anyone, but who could pass up such a generous offer? Needless to say, as a Catholic I would be pleased to go to confession and avail myself of this advertised deal. I didn’t feel I needed the indulgence, but indulgences aren’t to be passed up.

In the vastness of St. Peter’s there were a good number of confessionals. The permanent stalls were being supported to serve the Jubilee crowds by dozens of makeshift shriving pews, scattered about in the vastness. They had signs posted that indicated the languages spoken by the attending priest. This was a bit unfortunate for us congregants, because any savvy veteran of the Faith knows that it’s best to confess to someone who can’t understand what you’re actually saying. But with this scheme in Rome, if you chose to confess to a Swahili-speaking priest, you were hit with a guilt trip, at least, and, maybe even a new sin? But what the hell, I hadn’t been confessed in a while, and during such a rich experience as a visit to the Vatican, let’s add to the richness: I’ll confess honestly. I chose a tent-like confessional with a priest whose signage said he spoke English and Spanish.

I say “tent-like,” which might well seem bizarre, but that’s how I envisage the scene: bazaar-like, with a bunch of these small Sahara-type tents set in an array across St. Peter’s grand interior plaza. Duke Ellington’s Caravan, mashed-up with Van Morrison’s song, were playing in my head, and Peter O’Toole’s glistening face from Lawrence of Arabia loomed out of nowhere, as I approached my chosen tent and, folding back the flap, ducked in. I was wondering what a Bedouin was.

My guy inside, no Bedouin, was certainly a prelate from south of the Sahara in Africa, and as it happened, he certainly had opinions about the Western World.

After reciting the Act of Contrition as best I could remember it, I told this cleric of my white lies and about yelling at the kids. My most recent confession had been at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1995 on the eve of my marriage, so I was a little rusty. On that occasion five years prior, I had chosen St. Pat’s over our parish in Greenwich Village, which was the similarly aged and grand Our Lady of Pompeii (Caroline’s site of baptism), because, I figured, “The guys at St. Pat’s must have heard everything.” I’d been right about that. When I mumbled “getting married . . . love my fiancée deeply . . . her name’s Luci by the way . . . you’d like her . . . she’s Catholic . . . ummm, been living in New York . . . you know, the ’80s and all . . .” the priest, clearly young, basically said sure, yeah, no sweat. He might’ve even chuckled as he gave me three Hail Marys and a couple of Our Fathers—a jaywalker’s penalty, like the house special that Fathers Coughlin and Verrill handed out weekly to teenage boys at St. John’s in North Chelmsford. Father Coughlin needed to get back to the Saturday afternoon game on TV, Notre Dame v. Someone. The Manhattan priest was figuring, Next guy in’s a pusher or hit man. I’ll conserve my allotment.

I was confident that this, in the basilica in Rome, would be a different experience but no less salutary. My sins were venial in the extreme. I swear a lot. I get mad sometimes. Excusable by any measure. Jesus Himself would say so. JPII would say so.

And yet this priest was keen for an inquisition.

“You are an American?” he asked ominously before pronouncing penance.

“I am,” I said, befuddled. You have to tell the truth while in the box. And maybe he wanted to talk baseball? Notre Dame football?

“And you have never been unfaithful to your wife?”

“Well, no, I haven’t.”

“And you haven’t sanctioned the abortion?”

“No, I haven’t. Never have.”

I was not indignant, although I had every right to be. I was very much intimidated. He, for his part, seemed unconvinced by my denial. I believe he harrumphed, or at least sighed. I thought he was going to go down the ladder to whether I supported a woman’s right to choose, which I unequivocally did support and still do, but he had a line of just-as-bad penitents outside waiting a turn. He issued a penalty of at least a dozen prayers, and I figure that was because he didn’t believe anything that I or any other “American” might say, in the confessional or out of it.

But I had told the goddam truth. I would testify with the same words today, twenty years on: I am devoted entirely to Luci, and always have been. She’s devoted to me. Ask her. And we’re devoted to our kids. We’re lucky people, all this devotion.

Lucky as I am . . . This lad has vowed to never again forget his wife’s birthday, and to temain true to his wedding anniversary. So far, I’ve had memory enough to keep this vow. I don’t even have to go to the Planner to know what’s coming up on 09/13 or 03/04.

March fourth, march forth! The only directional in the calendar, and you can look it up.